Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast features the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
272 Anat Shenker-Osorio - Why climate messages don’t land and how to rewrite the regenerative narrative
A conversation with Anat Shenker-Osorio, founder of A.S.O. Communications, a progressive political communication bureau known for slogans such as “Don’t take the temperature, change it” and “A great message doesn’t say what’s already popular; a great message makes popular what needs to be said".
We try so hard in the regenerative (and probably any other progressive) space to work on our messaging, how to communicate, how to reach people inside our bubble and beyond. We try to speak to those within the agrochemical and food industry, to make them see how environmentally sound, healthy, and economically interesting a different food and agriculture system could be. But somehow, we haven’t gotten very far. We’re constantly out-lobbied and outsmarted by the very well-organised extractive ag industry. (No, this isn’t an evil conspiracy, but it is definitely well-organised.)
With Anat we dive deep into the world of effective campaigning, messaging, and communication. Because we’re always going to be up against a much higher budget, but let’s at least use the airspace we do have as effectively as possible.
But we’ve got news for you: most people don’t want to join the losing team. So, stop communicating like we’ve already lost. Start getting people to join the small but winning team. Don’t deny reality and never lie. But do understand what makes people listen, and more importantly, what makes them take action: consume differently, protest, organise, vote (if you can).
Because in the end, this is all about who has the power.
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In Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast show we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.
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No matter what we look like, where we come from or where we live. Most of us know that our most cherished moments involve nurturing the ones we love. Want to peddle lies to us about the food that we can eat and use to ensure our families' health and well-being. They know that if they can scare us that we will look the other way while they poison our air and water and pick our pockets, stealing the wealth that our work creates. Pick our pockets, stealing the wealth that our work creates. A healthy, delicious future is ours for the taking. We can have tomatoes that taste like one, not like a magazine photo.
Speaker 2:When and if we kick them to the curb and we produce healthy, locally made food our way for our families. This is the Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast, where we learn more on how to put money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems, while making an appropriate and fair return. Welcome to another episode today with the founder of ASO, a progressive political communication bureau with slogans like don't take the temperature but change it. And the great message doesn't say what's already popular, but a great message makes popular what needs to be said. Welcome, annette.
Speaker 1:Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2:And we have a lot to discuss. I really I've reached out because I really enjoyed. I will see if I can put a link, probably behind the paywall, but a link to an article I've reached out because I really enjoyed. I will see if I can put a link it's probably behind the paywall, but a link to an article I read on your work in the Correspondent, which is, let's say, a news site in the Netherlands but paid for by the users, not by advertisements and all of those things, which means you get some interesting insights or some interesting let's say not super urgent news. I will see if I can create some kind of share link with that.
Speaker 2:Anyway, it was absolutely fascinating to see and to read in this case and we're going to listen to that as well the power of storytelling, the power of communications and the power of messaging. But I want to start with a personal question we always like to ask. In this case, of course, it's not necessarily focused on soil and ag but what made you spend most of your waking hours and for sure you've told this story 650,000 times but spend most of your waking hours focusing on communication and progressive communication, or, let's say, communication that works, which is not always the same thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I often tell people that there is so, so, so much outside of our control. We cannot control what our opposition says. We cannot control how much endless money they are able to spend to peddle their poisonous ideas.
Speaker 2:They always seem to have more than what we have at our disposal for communication. A little bit more, just a tiny bit more.
Speaker 1:um, we can't control you know the fact that in many of our countries the media is bought and paid for and complicit in at best both sides in debates, that in which, in fact, there is one side, the side of humanity, uh, and I guess the other side is the side of the billionaires.
Speaker 1:So in that case there's both sides, but as far as what is actually accurate and correct and actionable, there's one side. So we can't control any of that. But what we can control one of the few, few, few things that we can control is the words that come out of our mouth and out of our fingers if we are typing them. And so I focus on communication because, first of all, that's just my sort of educational and professional background is in looking at a field called cognitive linguistics and applying it to try to understand why certain messages resonate where others don't. But the reason that I was drawn to that, besides just coming from a multilingual household speaking multiple languages myself, being interested in the literal act of communication that is, conveying ideas through, you know, these percussive sounds that we produce with our vocal folds, but also with our fingers if it's the written word is because that's a thing that's under our power.
Speaker 2:And some examples just for people that don't know your work, let's say, or something that led you into the progressive world, like where they can see things going very, very wrong. Or just not hitting, let's say, because we produce an immense amount of words, immense amount of words, written audio, and most of it seems to just not hit home or not hit a nerve or not get to action, even though we've been shouting about climate change for I don't know how long. Biodiversity loss, like the list goes on and on and on and we'll get to food and egg, like what can we learn from, let's say, what works? But remember one of your first encounters to figure out, okay, what doesn't work and what works, like where was that switch between, at the end, just other letters or just between brackets, like another way of framing, or even using just another word got a completely different reaction or even using just another word, got a completely different reaction.
Speaker 1:Sure, I mean, there are so many that go flooding into my brain. I can recall so many times before I did sort of more deliberate consideration and study and I spend most of my time now as a researcher doing big empirical experiments around this message versus that message, and what does that mean and how are people receiving it, and so on. But when I was a little baby comms person as any baby comms or non-baby comms person will tell you if they're telling you the truth, when you look around at a lot of the ways that progressive communication is constructed, it's just off the gut, it's just off instinct and that's not a shock, right? We are all communicators. We all communicate, whether it is with gesture, whether it is with voice, whether it is with writing, whether it is with you know pantomime, with facial expressions, whatever, like we're all communicating all the time, and so it's often difficult for people to understand that you can make deliberate choices around one word or another. So, to get to a concrete example, I don't. This is far from the first one, it's just one that really stands out. That really stands out.
Speaker 1:I live in California and in 2008, the same election with the historic, you know, barack Obama coming into the White House. A really incredible moment for this country in multiple, multiple dimensions. But also the year that California famously progressive California, I say that in quotations barred marriage equality, so passed something called the Proposition 8, which was a ballot initiative. So it was voted on by popular referendum to ban same-sex marriage. Because prior to that, then mayor of San Francisco, now governor Gavin Newsom, had been sort of rogue marrying people at the San Francisco now governor Gavin Newsom had been sort of rogue marrying people at the San Francisco Capitol.
Speaker 1:And in the lead up to that Prop 8 loss, on the basis of the way that research normally gets done which I have a lot of pun intended on this podcast beef with it was thought to be the best messaging and the best argument to give very practical discourse.
Speaker 1:So married filing jointly hospital visitation rights, the right to marry.
Speaker 1:This is harming us and this is interfering with our rights, because the idea was and the testing showed that if you talked about love and relationships, then people who were in the opposition kind of got sketched out because you children think of the children, which is, you know, a common refrain in this kind of arena the campaign to try to defeat Prop 8 was had no children in it and had no queer people in it.
Speaker 1:It was all like very nice straight white couples being like. You know, I think it's important that everyone have the same rights and you know, if people want to be married, they should be able to file jointly on their taxes and visit each other in the hospital, and so that was the message that was sort of blandly inoffensive to the greatest number of people in the sample, but it was also the message that no one in their right mind would ever repeat, because no one has ever stood in line at a grocery store and said you know, I was just thinking the other day of my joint filer and how, when we do our taxes together, because that's not how normal people conceive of romantic relationships.
Speaker 1:And so when, after that really terrible loss, there was a lot of really really smart research and campaigning done by a lot of really smart people, there was a shift away from the right to marry to the freedom to marry, a shift away from gay marriage to marriage equality. Because as soon as you call it gay marriage, when you take a noun that is normally naked and you stick a qualifier on it, what you're doing linguistically is creating a new category. In essence, what you're conveying to people tacitly is well, there's regular marriage which presumably is the kind that I'm in with a man.
Speaker 1:And then there's gay marriage, which is this other kind of marriage, and so that's already sort of setting it apart, whereas marriage equality is a values-based argument and a shift away from that sort of super practical hospital visitation rights, taxes, to love is love and love makes a family. And having ads that shocker actually had gay and lesbian people in them and showed kids and was like, yeah, no, we are doing this because we want to have families. We're not going to lie to you and hide that from you because there's nothing nefarious going on here. So that is a long example to sort of walk through the old thinking and why it didn't work and the new thinking in a case study that I think all of us are familiar with.
Speaker 2:And then it started to work Like it started to hit all of us are familiar with. And then it started to work Like it started to hit. It started to actually, after that terrible loss, it started to move people and move votes across the US, basically.
Speaker 1:Yeah, across the US and outside the US.
Speaker 2:And so when we bring that to other sectors, I don't know. I mean, you've done a lot in the political side of things on migrants in Europe as well, but on food and agriculture, have you done any work on that side? Or, if you haven't, we're going to apply some of it to, let's say, the sector we spend most of our time on.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So what I would say is I've from Wisconsin, which is a big dairy state, lots and lots and lots of cows, lots and lots and lots of milk A state where margarine was illegal up until the 1980s because that is how much you know butter dominated. That is one of my favorite Wisconsin fun facts, the fact that margarine was actually illegal. So I would say I've done sort of adjacent things. And then I am aware of newer campaigns, for example in Brazil around industrial agriculture with the Amazon rainforest. More recently in Spain around kind of locavore growing locally things. So what I would say is that first of all, there is a set of cardinal sins that exist across progressive messaging, and I often tell people that I could spend every minute of every day dealing with what I'm about to describe in every kind of progressive issue area and be fully employed for the rest of my life in the most boring way possible, which I would prefer not to be doing, just repeating stuff.
Speaker 1:So the first is the tendency to begin every message with one of three things, which is boy, have I got a problem for you? This is the Titanic, would you like to buy a ticket? And we're the losing team. We lose a lot, we lost recently, so you should join us. Those are our three favorite things to say in different permutations the Titanic, because they know how that movie ends and they're not excited about hopping aboard.
Speaker 1:Most people got 99 problems and they don't want yours. They are not out shopping for something else to be upset about. And then most people don't want to join the losing team. I think Hollywood, the underdog story like, has sucked us all in, and the reason why there is a tendency among advocates and activists who formulate this messaging again instinctively off the cuff is that for activists by which I mean ideologically aligned with your position and already mobilized, already doing stuff, that kind of a person, which is a very small segment of any population they love new problems. Boy, have I got a problem for you? Is their love language. And they're like a new problem, I'm so excited.
Speaker 2:And we're losing, by the way. So, yeah, let's, let's get on that, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, oh also, this is sort of the righteous fight and and I will be in this fight no, with some attention to your issue. But like, they're certainly not donating, they're not marching, they're not protesting, they're not telling other people about this, they're not ready to change their consumptive behavior, or maybe they are ready to change their consumptive behavior, but that's about it. They're not sort of in power building and in kind of direct action. So for the base, even the progressive base, they're not attracted to we're losers. This is the Titanic. And also here's a new problem, because they've got life to deal with, they got things going on and they're not going to sign up to a lost cause.
Speaker 1:So that is one sort of cardinal sin that, like I don't even need to look across the landscape of messaging on Big Ag and so on, I'm just going out on a limb and saying that's happening because I've never seen it not happening. I'm just going out on a limb and saying that's happening because I've never seen it not happening. The next cardinal sin is pretending like we don't know where problems come from. So there is a tendency to write everything in what is technically called in agentive constructions. It's loosely the passive voice, even if it's not sort of like fits, the exact grammatical definition of the passive voice, even if it's not sort of like fits, the exact grammatical definition of the passive voice. This is when we say things like harms are increasing, farmland is lost, you know, natural rivers are being polluted. In other issue areas, wages are falling. The gap between rich and poor is growing. Uh, as organizations in my country like to say, democracy is eroding because apparently democracy is a mountain that has been standing outside for too long and it just keeps raining. It's not actually the fact that there is a fascist power grab occurring and literal white nationalists who are now deploying the military against people who have literally weaponized government against the American population. All of this is just sort of happening in the ether. When we don't make clear at the outset that a problem is person-made, it becomes cognitively inconsistent to ask for it to be person-fixed. If wages are falling because, I don't know, I guess they got heavy, they ate too much it was Thanksgiving, I'm not sure like they acquired additional gravity in some way, some way, then why would you be asking for your lawmaker to pass a law that says corporations have to keep a wage at a certain point? And so those two things, and I'll add one more if it's not too much.
Speaker 1:The third sort of cardinal sin which happens over and, over and over again, over and over and over again, is that on the left we love to sell the recipe and not the brownie.
Speaker 1:So what I mean by that is that when you go and I'm sure none of your listeners do this, because you are all so healthy and like good at buying food made out of food, so you'll just have to trust me that this is a thing that exists. You've probably not even seen it because it is not at your like health food grocery store, but in many stores there is a product which is instant brownies. And so when you buy this product, it comes in a box and on the front of the box there is always a photo of a very attractive set of brownies always but when you open the box, there is never a brownie. There are no brownies. Inside the box with the picture of the brownie, there's a bag of powder and then on the back there's a set of steps that you have to follow to make that powder into a brownie. I know it's shocking, but you're just gonna have.
Speaker 2:I know people are now going to go outside, go to a supermarket and see if they can find it.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 1:I hope that sarcasm is allowed on this program, of course I hope people can tell so we keep selling the recipe instead of selling the brownie. So a recipe is paid family leave or universal paid family leave. A brownie is you're there the first time, your newborn smiles. A recipe is carbon offsets that allow trading that enables a. You know like I can't even finish the rest of the sentence. The brownie is. The water in your kid's cup is safe and healthy to drink. The recipe is ending subsidies to large agricultural producers and putting you know restrictions on emissions such that there are smaller family farms incentivized to create. Look like I get you know. On and on and on. All of that is recipe Brownie is. Your tomato tastes like one, not like a photo of one.
Speaker 2:Which is.
Speaker 2:We're very bad at selling that, I think Absolutely. I mean, everyone is, but specifically in food and egg. It's interesting because it's so not easy, but it's such an emotional subject, completely. We do three, four, five whenever. How many times you snack a day? And we all know that food doesn't taste anymore as it used to taste. There's a very gut feeling, feeling literally um piece to it and somehow we don't seem to cut through that and understand or not understand, but get that notion of like a tomato doesn't taste like a picture and, by the way, much healthier for you, much healthier for your children, etc. Like there's such a strong piece there and and story wise, we just haven't been. Or communication wise, we just haven't been. Or communication-wise, we just haven't been. Doubled. We say food is medicine and nutrient density, which is a horrible term, but it means yeah, the tomato was grown, and not all tomatoes are the same. It really depends how they're grown and how many you have to eat to get to the same level of phytonutrients or get the same level of health.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and what I would say is that in large part, that comes out of a broader phenomenon which I often shorthand as what you fight, you feed. Sorry, I did not realize how many food metaphors are inside.
Speaker 2:There's so many you can see like scratching the surface going like there's so many.
Speaker 1:My main area of study is in metaphor, so when I say what you fight you feed, I swear that I use that expression in other podcasts too. It's not just because we're literally talking about food, but anyway it applies double. So here is a like factoid that I like to use to illustrate what I mean I used to. We lived in Australia and I work in Australia a lot. It's one of the places that I've done many different kinds of campaigns, both electoral, but then also issue campaigns largely around people seeking asylum but other issues, including climate, and there is a fact that just drives the environmentalist community in Australia bonkers. We have a similar phenomenon in the US, which is that when Australians are asked what percentage of the workforce is in coal, like works in coal, the real answer and please don't quote me on this because I'm not looking at the literal number, but it's minuscule it's like 0.02%, it's something very small and Australians routinely guess it's something I think the average guess it averages out to 9%, which is, like many, many sort of times greater. And the same is true in the United States. If you ask sort of the average American, hey, you know, what percentage of jobs do you think are in oil and gas it's their guess is just like wildly off what it actually is, and you can imagine why this drives the environmental community just absolutely bonkers. And what I say to them is yeah, what you fight you feed.
Speaker 1:You talk about coal all day long. All you do is talk about how horrific coal is, and it is, but all of that airtime that you are talking about coal and how bad coal is and coal is so bad and coal is so bad. And can you believe coal and coal is doing this and coal is doing that? Do you get where I'm going? Instead of saying, a clean energy future is ours for the taking and anyone who says differently is lining their pockets with poisoning your lungs. All of the time that we spend being like big ag is evil, big ag is growing. Big ag is huge. Big ag is poisoning us. Big ag is this? Big ag? Is that big ag? Is this? Industrial agriculture, pesticides, this thing, this corporation, monsanto? Whatever is time that you are not spending?
Speaker 1:actually talking, yeah, saying actually, this is precisely what we could have. And these people are the ones who are deliberately peddling lies about what is possible, because they want to keep poisoning you.
Speaker 2:How big of a switch have you noticed in other sectors or in other issue areas, as you mentioned, that mental switch to go to effective communication, like fact-based, not fact-based, like actually research-based, like what works and what doesn't Like. How big of a mental, how difficult is it for just asking for friends in the Food and Eggs space to start actually seeing the things you mentioned and not get stay stuck in the way we currently communicate?
Speaker 1:stay stuck in the way we currently communicate. It's like learning to write with your non-dominant hand. So I'm right-handed, I don't know what you are, but you're left-handed, so I can write with my left hand. You can write with your right hand. It's cumbersome, it's uncomfortable. My handwriting looks terrible if I use the other hand. It takes me longer. It's cumbersome, it's uncomfortable. My handwriting looks terrible If I use the other hand. It takes me longer. It's annoying. Why would I? I could just write with my right hand, like why would I stick a pen in my left hand? That's why.
Speaker 1:And so what happens is that we are habituated into dominant forms of communication and just because some person shows us, even if we sort of believe them, which in many cases, we don't want to believe them. And the reason we don't want to believe them is because we would have to come to recognize some level of our own complicity in the problem that we're trying to solve, because we have been communicating with people in a way that I would argue is fundamentally unprogressive. We have been yelling at people, we have been scolding people, we have been scaring people, we have been trying to use all sorts of levers that actually, over time, the research shows, make people more conservative.
Speaker 2:And that's a painful realization.
Speaker 1:It's not great, like no, I get it. And I see these other campaigns and I see why they've won and I see why talking about harms and horrors is actually not activating people. And I accept and this is where a lot of challenge comes that just telling people the truth. If we were to just tell people the truth, just tell them the facts.
Speaker 2:If we get more facts, we'll be there.
Speaker 1:Is what is happening, and that is our responsibility. Our responsibility is to provide people with accurate, comprehensive information about what is occurring. And my response back to that is are you a science teacher? It is somebody's responsibility, but if your job is not to be a science teacher, if your job is actually to change hearts and minds and to alter what people are willing to do, not just purely in their own consumer behavior, but more broadly in seizing power, because these are all, ultimately, questions of who has power that is what it all comes down to in every single one of these issues, and so, even if people are sort of like past all that and they're like, yes, I understand, I need to do it in this other way.
Speaker 1:You know, to be fair to human beings, myself included, habituated behavior is very, very hard to overcome, and so it takes a very deliberate practice, because it's not just a matter of oh, you gave me a messaging guide. You said embrace this, replace this, do say this, don't say that. This paragraph, not that paragraph, this word not that word. It also comes into play with the images that you use, the campaigns that you run and, most importantly, actually having a theory of change, because a lot of where all of this breaks down as well is that we put the messaging cart before the horse, and sometimes we put going to make a TikTok, or we're going to get 10,000 new followers on Blue Sky, or we're going to do a podcast, or we're going to do a press conference, or we're going to launch a balloon into you know, whatever. These are all forms of engagement and any one of them could be fantastic. They could be the best idea anyone ever had. But that is oftentimes where people begin, or, if not, that they begin with like a very clever message that they've come up with A pun, that they've created Something that is, you know, alliterative. I love alliteration, so I'm very guilty of being into alliteration, but what they don't do is have a goal first, because your goal is what defines your target audience, which is what ought to define your message, which is what ought to define your engagement. And, if I may, let me give you a super concrete example.
Speaker 1:There are many, but one really sort of instructive one. This is from a while back. Years and years ago, the Texas Highway Patrol in the United States was noticing a lot of litter on the side of the road, and at the time this was the 90s, there was a prevailing anti-litter campaign, which was this cute little owl and it was give a hoot, don't pollute. And the owl sang a little song. And so the Texas Highway Department did a study to try to figure out where is this litter coming from, and it turned out that it was people who were driving long haul trucks, those really huge trucks that go a great distance, those really huge trucks that go a great distance, and they were working so many hours that they didn't have time to actually stop and eat their lunch. Because the United States, essentially, if you're a corporation, you can make people do whatever you want, including have to, like, pee into a bottle, because this is, as you know, the greatest country on earth. And if people can't hear sarcasm in that, god forbid, because that's what that is.
Speaker 2:She's doing air quotes for the people that are looking at us air quotes as well, just to add to it. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Thank you, just you know. So people understand exactly where I'm coming from. So these long haul truckers would eat their lunch in the truck and then throw the paper out the window.
Speaker 2:And the question is do.
Speaker 1:we think that Hootie the owl with his cute little give a hoot, don't pollute, was the right message for a long haul trucker in Texas, and that is where the Texas Highway Patrol came up with the don't mess with Texas, which, for those of you who know anything about the US, and about Texas in particular, know that that has become so ubiquitous that it's basically a Texas slogan, but it actually began as an anti-litter campaign.
Speaker 1:In particular, know that that has become so ubiquitous that it's basically a Texas slogan, but it actually began as an anti-litter campaign. That's a perfect example of a match between what you're trying to get done, who you know the audience to be and how you select the message. I can give you example upon example in which we do match and in example after example where we don't match, and so a lot of this just comes down to the problems that we confront, especially in the climate, environment, et cetera. Space are so massive and overwhelming that it feels extraordinarily difficult to come up with a theory of change. What are you actually trying to get people to believe? And if they believed it, what are you trying to get them to do? And then you work from there to figure out oh, that means my audience is long-haul truck drivers in texas and it worked.
Speaker 2:By the way. I mean, I'm asking the obvious question, but but did it reduce the litter?
Speaker 1:It did, it did yes.
Speaker 2:And so really clear, and I think we are so often guilty of that echo chamber piece as well. But now in the food movement and in the ag movement, we need to get out of that, obviously because it is about power, it's about legislation, it's about companies doing all kinds of stuff that is actually legal and illegal at the same time as well, and how do we hold them accountable? And we have amazing farmers doing amazing things, but they're sort of against all odds and we cannot expect and there's some great actually there's some great work being done, specifically by Peter Bick and others on like the psychology of farmers in transition, like why do the neighbors change or not if they have a successful neighbor next to them? And it's mind-bogglingly interesting to see why they even they see across the fence healthier cows way, healthier grass house in order not losing money actually being successful. And then would they ask the neighbor for help or not, or even ask what are you doing differently? Because across their fence and you couldn't argue, of course, that the rain is different because you are literally sharing only a fence line. That's the only difference. Management has to be the only difference. And still, people have lived next to each other for 20, 30 years and never asked. Well, one is clearly degraded and the other one is clearly not.
Speaker 2:But we cannot expect I mean, those are the pioneers we cannot expect the next cohort of farmers or next cohort of consumers to have so much mental space or care enough, or care not enough about what others think, to actually start transitioning. You'll be laughed at in the village. Your fields are messy. We've heard stories of children not being invited anymore for soccer practice because somebody went organic. Things like that, like not kidding. So there's a lot of cultural pressure, let's say, to keep things the same, because basically, by saying something could be different, you're saying their parents were wrong. In that sense, the grandparents, et cetera, et cetera. It's very strong and they're often still involved in the farm. So that's extra tricky.
Speaker 2:But now we get to a point. Okay, we have some great pioneers. In many contexts you can find amazing farmers. What's that group around them? Or what's the next group and the next group that are somewhere else on the curve and definitely not crazy enough to do it Probably rightfully so. And that messaging has to be completely different and has to be really understood. Okay, what's the second, third, fourth cohort groups that are going to ditch certain chemicals and how do we hold their hand and make sure they can transition? I have to support that, et cetera to even consider doing things differently in a sector where you have maybe 40 harvests it's not that you have like you can iterate constantly no, you try something, you see if it works next year. So that's a but it's a hugely psychology piece there that we have, I think I'm safe to say, completely missed until now.
Speaker 1:I have suggestions on that.
Speaker 2:Please do, because it was a long rant without a question.
Speaker 1:No, not at all. I'll just invent a question out of it. Media 101 is that you just have the things you want to say and it doesn't matter what the interviewer says. The interviewer is not your audience, the audience is the audience, and so you should know what you want to say and you should twist what the interviewer is saying.
Speaker 2:Thank you for the question and I'm going to ask. I'm going to give my answer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Anyway, that's just me making a meta commentary on how to message. So the first thing is it's just so fascinating that the psychological process that you described is exactly the same psychological process I just described with adoption of new messaging. Like the same thing is occurring.
Speaker 2:That's why I brought it up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So humans are funny creatures, even when we know better, or we ought to know better, like we don't necessarily change for all sorts of reasons that have their roots in evolution, like it's not completely just sort of nuts. Humans are social creatures. So this is me now moving into solution space. So, regardless of how much right-wing discourse we've all been subjected to in our various geographies, that you know the only thing that matters is the individual, or the individual plus the family, and you're on your own and you need to maximize things for yourself. And, in the US context, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, you know, unless your dad can just hand you a golden toilet, or you can be from apartheid South Africa and, you know, make money off of destroying the native African population. But, yeah, bootstraps, right. So basically, people do the thing they think people like them do.
Speaker 1:This is a concept in psychology that is known as social proof. This is a concept in psychology that is known as social proof, and so every time we have messaging that says, in the voting context, for example, young people are really not turning out to vote and participation among Latinos is, you know, historically low in midterm elections and black people turned out at lower rates this last election or whatever. You're actually increasing the. You're giving social permission for people not to vote because you're saying your category of a person, however you self-identify does not engage in this behavior. Another example speaking about vaccine hesitancy, actually increased vaccine hesitancy You're giving license to behavior that you're attempting to eliminate by saying this is a crisis. People are not doing this. People are not getting vaccinated, people are not converting to organic agriculture. Not enough people are doing this. People are not doing this.
Speaker 2:And guess what People will probably not do it?
Speaker 1:You're not just saying you're inviting people not to do it. You're saying the dominant way to live in society is this antiquated, really dangerous, perverse way. But you're saying that's what most people do. And the fact is, as social creatures, humans try to fit in, even when they're being countercultural. There's a reason why in high school all the goth kids look identical, right?
Speaker 2:Which is always so ironic yeah.
Speaker 1:In order to be countercultural. You're not going to do that by yourself. That's dangerous. You're going to go against the dominant mainstream, but only if you can create your own sub-community. So what does that mean in terms of messaging and this kind of agriculture? It means shifting away from too few people are doing this. Not enough people are doing this. A handful of people are doing this almost nobody's doing this to saying I'll. I'll take the Netherlands as my example. Across the Netherlands, like never before, people are embracing new ways of growing food, eating food, coming together and having a delicious future. Every year it grows more and more the people who are caring for themselves, putting food on the table and being home in time to eat it. Because, even if it's not enough, it is still true that it is increasing. Like because I don't advocate ever for lying. There's no lying in any of my messages. Don't do that. But it is both the case that not enough people are doing this and most people are staying stubbornly stuck in bad patterns, but it is also the case that it is increasing year by year. That is a true statement, and so when we talk about it, as more and more people are doing this, more and more people are on this train.
Speaker 1:You can get on board or you can be the last one explaining to your grandchild why you got left behind. And in a lot of ways, marriage equality once again is really instructive. There was a shift away from. This is a very controversial issue and people are abusing us and you know they hate us and they're against us and they don't want this and we need to have this right to protect ourselves, because most of society is against us to essentially saying we're getting married people. You can either get on board or you can try to explain to your grandchild why you had an issue with this, but you're going to look the fool. I wouldn't add the look the fool part. But yeah, it's a fake. It till you make it kind of thing. You say this is what the majority of people are doing At a sort of engagement level. You do things like competitions among neighbors for who can use the least water in a month and you have municipalities reward that. You do competitions for sort of who can use the least fertilizer in a month or whatever.
Speaker 1:I don't know enough about the practicalities of it and you actually sort of make it a game where people can win and show other people that they're winning.
Speaker 2:And so I think the fake it until you make it not necessarily, of course, again focusing on the facts and really focusing on what's moving, what's happening, is something that obviously, coming back again to it, doesn't really come natural because we're so deep in the red. Let's say, in all these issues Not all, I mean many things are actually moving forward, like we often forget, but it's very easy to get in the I mean because of media get in that spiral to starting. Actually there are many more people showing up on this and the farms are growing left and right, and actually one of the main joys I've seen in this space specifically, I've been following now for the last 15 years is the influx of people and the influx of quality people that have experience elsewhere, that have built companies, that have built farms, funds etc. That somewhere I still haven't figured out why, but get bitten by the soil bug, let's say, either through personal health, through family health, through climate which was why I got into it through biodiversity, whatever inequality, whatever the angle is, it doesn't really matter and then they fall down the rabbit hole and figure out Fudanag is everywhere, not only in our language, but literally connected everywhere. If you care about inequality, health, et cetera. You're going to end up at Soil at some point.
Speaker 2:So, seeing that influx of talent that wasn't there before, like nobody cared I mean not nobody. Very few people cared 15 years ago. If I mentioned Soil to investors they were like, okay, yeah, let's talk about green mobility or something like that. Now it's like a topic, it's a thing. Doesn't make it any easier, but at least we are with way more and and it becomes uh, by almost self-fulfilling prophecy, that this is an important thing and more farmers feel uh comfortable talking about soil and comfortable ditching certain things and not doing certain things and and selling a plow god forbid, that used to be the status symbol of every farmer, arable farmer, and so it's. It's interesting how that reinforces it still feels we're really at and selling a plow God forbid. That used to be the status symbol of every farmer, arable, farmer, and so it's interesting how that reinforces it still feels we're really at the beginning, like it still feels like we're so small compared to but it definitely way bigger than 10, 15 years ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, I think another staple of what we see in climate discourse that is problematic and could change is, ironically, all of the oil and gas corporations.
Speaker 2:All of their messaging, all of their advertising is focused on the future true a better future the moment you talked about oil gas and I started thinking about all the ad for that. Actually, it's's all shiny, it's all green.
Speaker 1:Yeah, powering your future, bringing the future to light, bringing the future to life, moving toward a better future, like. All of these are slogans that you know. Exxon, bp, texaco, et cetera have like, if not those literal words, some permutations, so they sort of live in this very we're powering your future, we're moving you into this future. And when you do language analysis of conservation, of sort of environmental discourse, it's rooted ba-dum-bum in the past. Sometimes it's about the present. Very rarely is it about the future, and campaigns, largely speaking, are a battle over who definers of the future rather than only battling the present or having recriminations about the past. Then we couldn't possibly win. Now I want to be clear. Going back to my diatribe about the passive voice, I am not arguing that we make believe that everything is fine. I said before there's no lying in my messages. I don't believe in lying. Everything is not fine. What it means is that what we have found is that an effective message follows a set order, which is values, villain, vision. So you do call out the problem. Don't mistake me. It's just not your opening salvo. Your hello to new people is not hello nice to meet you at this party. I have a lot of problems Would you like to hear about them. Because if you start like that, most people are going to wander to the hors d'oeuvre table and be like don't talk to that person. Like you don't want to talk to that person. You'll thank me later for warning you.
Speaker 1:So instead, what we say is something like no matter what we look like, where we come from or where we live, most of us know that our most cherished moments involve nurturing the ones we love. That's the opening value that everyone's like. Yeah, of course, like that's very common. There is no culture in which food is not like the mainstay and the connection, as you said, the social cohesion, the love.
Speaker 1:But today, this is where we get into the villain in the active voice. A handful of giant ag corporations and the politicians they've paid for want to peddle lies to us about the food that we can eat and use to ensure our families' health and well-being and well-being. They know that if they can scare us that, we will look the other way while they poison our air and water and pick our pockets, stealing the wealth that our work creates. A healthy, delicious future is ours for the taking. We can have tomatoes that taste like one, not like a magazine photo when and if we kick them to the curb and we produce healthy, locally made food our way for our families. Now that needs to be copyedited and whatever, but that's values, will and vision.
Speaker 2:And interestingly enough and I'm going to wrap up because I know I need to go it's how many of these farmers speak. The most advanced ones are very tuned to this, probably because they had a lot of people on tours and they can see what works. But they don't have the stage yet. We're working on that Top 50 farmers and others. Definitely the next heroes will be people that take care of the land, because they're taking all the risks and we need them to produce food, fiber and oils in a way that nurtures all of us and not just a few pockets of large companies. But it's interesting during you were talking, I've heard a number of farmers talk like that.
Speaker 2:But the problem is for the audience is relatively small, but that means there's a lot of options to start messaging differently. We don't have to look very far, because it's such a personal connection most people have with food. I mean, there's some people that just drink food out of a bottle and think that as a meal, but that's not the target group. Let's be very clear here that's not the ones we're going to target for. So I want to thank you so much. I want to wrap up and thank you for the work you do. Obviously in all the progressive areas. None of them is more important than others, but hopefully you'll find time and some interesting clients in the future as well around Food and Ag, because we desperately need more of this.
Speaker 1:Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me.
